ProGAN: Network Embedding via Proximity Generative Adversarial Network

Network embedding has attracted increasing attention in recent few years, which is to learn a low-dimensional representation for each node of a network to benefit downstream tasks, such as node classification, link prediction, and network visualization. Essentially, the task of network embedding can be decoupled into discovering the proximity in the original space and preserving it in the low dimensional space. Only with the well-discovered proximity can we preserve it in the low-dimensional space. Thus, it is critical to discover the proximity between different nodes to learn good node representations. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel proximity generative adversarial network (ProGAN) which can generate proximities. As a result, the generated proximity can help to discover the complicated underlying proximity to benefit network embedding. To generate proximities, we design a novel neural network architecture to fulfill it. In particular, the generation of proximities is instantiated to the generation of triplets of nodes, which encodes the similarity relationship between different nodes. In this way, the proposed ProGAN can generate proximities successfully to benefit network embedding. At last, extensive experimental results have verified the effectiveness of ProGAN.